ABSTRACT
Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s gleeful summary of his desperate position – ‘my centre is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent. I shall attack’ – may have rallied an army in extremis but as a strategem it would never do for a political party, except, perhaps, a Marxist-Leninist one. Without a solid, unwavering centre, occasionally defended by the right from left-wing theologians, and saved by the left from right-wing revisionists, any party, particularly a democratic socialist one, faces catastrophe. It was the Foch-like weakening of Labour’s centre which courted the Party’s extinction in the early 1980s. The centre then, including many of the former Callaghan Government cabinet members, faltered in the face of hostility from the rampant and Militant left and desertion from a spiritless right. Certain of being booed if they approached the rostrum at Party Conferences – had they been so lucky as to catch the eye of the partisan chairmen of those days – they regrettably ducked below the parapet and betrayed their purpose in politics. It was the high-water mark of the centre’s cowardice, demonstrating the peril when it does collapse. The right, meanwhile, with few exceptions, was in headlong retreat and actively in search of a different home. The result was that Labour’s position swiftly became more hazardous than at any time since 1931, culminating in the fiasco of 1983, a general election fought on a manifesto aptly described by Gerald Kaufman as the longest suicide note in history. Before the last gasp, however, the centre regained its nerve, and its resurgence – surprisingly if inevitably led by a former left-winger, Neil Kinnock – made Labour electable again, though it took 14 years after the departure of Michael Foot from the leadership for the Party to return to government.
